I had interesting case last week - I had to setup SQL 2005 database mirror. First it sounded as piece of cake - I had to follow steps and recommendations as described in SQL Server Books Online (and here). My goal was to setup DB mirror of type High safety with automatic failover (synchronous).

I had to prepare SQL Instances as:

Create a user (called SqlService in my case) with same password on all machines that will participate in the mirror. Give it enough rights to it. (I put it in Administrators group and denied local login. Later I set more granular security to it)

) to a simple web application but when I stopped the instance that hold Principal database the mirror database didn't became principal as expected.

Note: This test was done on SQL 2005 Standard Edition with SP2 on Windows 2003 Standard with the latest updates.

I decided to test this on SQL 2005 Standard (with no SP2) in Win2003. And it worked. I applied SP2 then and I as able to setup DB mirroring again and everything worked as expected - even automatic failover.

Bottom line: Somehow SQL 2005 SP2 break DB mirroring if installed right after SQL Server installation. This was my experience and I if someone has another experience with this I would be grateful if we can discuss here

The title might seems strange as in 99.99% of cases we cannot afford Visual Studio in production environment. Even hardly mention this possibility could drive sysadmin crazy ;). Last moth Vladi Tchalkov gave a nice presentation on the subject on SofiaDev monthly meeting.

There is another resource on the subject - there is whole guide made by Patterns&Practice team in Microsoft -

I had interesting experience today: A custom ASP.NET control (written by me :( ) that wraps Google maps functionality produces very nice results for a while but placed in new design started to render like this in IE...

I have to say it behaves well in all test pages up to now... well what happened?!

Unfortunately this happened on very complicated page with master page, themes, pieces loaded into page from DB and so on... briefly said difficult to isolate the issue. But still.. we are talking for HTML&JS so this is where the search should start ad more precisely - around map code (you can find more how to setup such map on Google Maps API Documentation).

After digging around I found that the control was placed in a HTML table, but I tested mainly in DIV tags. And markup looks like this:

A quick test was setup and bingo.. this is it! It is broken on very simple page :) But why!? A (not so) quick search gave this forum post saying:

Your page structure contains this (very much simplified here)

1: <table>

2: <tr><td><divid="map"></td></tr>

3: <script>....</script>

4: </table>

That means that when the script is run, it's acting on a map within a table which hasn't been finalised because the browser hasn't reached </table>. In IE, everything within that table is treated as though it has zero size until the browser reaches </table> and sorts it all out.

If you've played with C# 3.0 and LINQ you might feel bored with good old .NET 2.0 projects. But wait! There is a way to use LINQ to Objects in .NET 2.0 projects. LINQBridge makes this possible. But how?

First, it's important to understand that C# 3.0 and Framework 3.5 are designed to work with CLR 2.0-the same CLR version that Framework 2.0 uses. This means that the C# 3.0 compiler emits IL code that runs on the same virtual machine as before.

This makes Framework 3.5 additive-just as Framework 3.0 was additive-comprising additional assemblies that enhance the existing 2.0 Framework and CLR. So there's nothing to stop us from writing our own assemblies that do the work of Framework 3.5 (at least, the critical bits required for local LINQ queries).

Can I use LINQBridge with C# 2.0 and Studio 2005?

You can-but the query operators will be awkward to use without lambda expressions, extension methods, query syntax, etc.

About the author

Galin Iliev - Galcho - is a software design engineer working at Microsoft and specializing in Microsoft technology stack and lately focusing on highly scallabe web services build with WCF and working . He holds MCT, MCPD and MCAD certificates.